Working in Color Modes

It wasn't that long ago that you were lucky if your computer's video card had 1MB of memory. Due to the physical constraints of that memory, a lot of applications would show you a screen with diffusion-dithered graphics. Color depth is inversely proportional to image resolution; for example, with 1MB of graphics card memory, a screen resolution of 1,024 by 768 could not be shown in true color, but instead had to be a limited palette of colors with dithering displayed to “fake” the colors that could not be shown. You'll find more information on this phenomena in Chapter 2, “The Critically Important Color and Gamma Calibration Chapter.” Thank goodness, we don't have to worry about video card memory in these times.

Note

The dithering processDithering is the placement of available colors in a given color mode in a pattern, to express colors that lie outside its range. GIF images are typically dithered because the GIF image format can hold only 256 unique colors.